Embodiments of the present invention relate to providing software help information and, more specifically, to a method and apparatus for providing software problem solutions.
Developments of information technology are providing more and more software products. Correspondingly, when using these software products, a user may fact more and more problems, such as “Is there a way to move existing SmartCloud iNotes emails to a Folder?”, “Why do I obtain an error when I try to send an email?”, etc. When a software problem arises, a user usually tries to solve it in the following manners:
A first manner often used is to search and explore help articles related to the software in a knowledge base so as to self-help in addressing the current software problems. However, in most cases, a user neither has enough knowledge to solve a problem that arises nor can identify a correct solution from various help information. On the other hand, although materials in a knowledge base are updated using plenty of network sources, the knowledge base still cannot cover all the problems the user may face. Thus, this manner of potential problem-solving cannot effectively solve software problems the user may face.
Another manner of potential problem-solving is to seek help from a software help desk when the software problem arises. Then, technical staff of the help desk may use a telephone or some remote control software to communicate with the user so as to solve the software problem. However, this requires a one-to-one technical support, which has a high cost. Furthermore, due to limitations of remote communication and the help desk's resultant limited knowledge of the problem, the help desk sometimes cannot fully understand the problem and the requirements of the user.
In a third manner of potential problem-solving, the user may post the problem to an Internet forum to solicit solutions. This manner requires a higher technical level of the user, because the user needs to have enough computer technical knowledge to describe the problem, understand solutions provided by other users, and apply the solutions to his own computer. Furthermore, other users of the forum may provide various different solutions, some of which may be provided as to different versions or different application environments, and some may even be wrong solutions. This makes it difficult to identify a correct solution from the various solutions provided.
Some dedicated help platforms and help systems exist to solve software problems. For instance, under a help platform, the user can select his own problem from a menu or manually input his own problem using a natural language string. Then, the help platform generates a value corresponding to the problem inputted by the user, and locates a solution of the problem in an information database using that value. However, such a help platform can only identify and solve some predefined problems rather than cover all problems of a user. Under another help platform, the context of a problem is analyzed to filter out keywords by which an appropriate solution suggestion is searched in a help system. Using such a help platform, a user can relatively easily obtain a solution of a software problem. However, contents supported by the help platform are limited to contents relating to predefined keywords, which cannot fully cover the user's problems. Other existing help platforms have shortcomings in other respects.